


H is for Homecoming

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:50:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Liars prepare to return to a Rosewood with Alison in it, Aria flashes back to her return home from Iceland and she admits she is uncertain about Alison's return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	H is for Homecoming

Aria had been putting off telling her friends that she was moving to Iceland for a year, although she’d been going to tell them the morning after the sleepover at Spencer’s. In a way, although she knew she was going to miss her friends, there was a part of her that was glad to be going. Knowing that her dad was going to be far away from Meredith could only be a good thing. Who knew, after a year, maybe Meredith would have met some other guy and would finally leave Byron alone.

And she could stop worrying about Alison as well. In Iceland, if there was ever any reason Aria didn’t want to go to some party or other, she could cry off and no one would hold the threat of revealing Byron’s affair over her head. Sometimes, Aria had wondered about just telling the others anyway, to leave Alison with no ammunition, but knew that she wouldn’t since Byron had asked her to keep it quiet. In some ways, she had wished at times that it had been anyone other than Alison who had been with her when she had found out, because anyone else wouldn’t have kept bringing it up.

Aria thought she knew how things would go while she was in Iceland – she thought she’d still keep in touch with all her friends, that Alison would email her all the gory details of exactly whose throats Noel Kahn had been sticking his tongue down while she was away and she’d end by telling Aria not to worry because she had taken care of it, leading Aria to think she hadn’t been worried until she read that and wishing Alison hadn’t told her.

Instead, Aria had left without saying goodbye to any of them, and hadn’t kept in touch with anyone. Mike still kept in touch with his friends from Rosewood, and Aria knew through him that Alison still hadn’t been found, but she never asked him anything else about home. Maybe Mike had picked up on that, because he didn’t volunteer a lot of information, at least while Aria was around. It was easier at the time to pretend that Rosewood didn’t exist. While Aria had attracted attention in Iceland in her first few weeks for being That American Girl, she still found that preferable to being That Girl Whose Best Friend Went Missing, which is what she would have been back home. And it was easier in Iceland to pretend that Meredith didn’t exist, either.

The timing of their first day back couldn’t have been worse if they had planned it. Since Ali was going to be in the news again with it being the anniversary of her disappearance, Aria was just going to be That Girl Whose Best Friend Went Missing all over again. The day when Ezra had asked her if she remembered what day it was and Aria had answered with something about it being the second anniversary of Ali’s disappearance only for Ezra to explain that he’d meant their own anniversary, Aria had realised that Ezra was the one relationship she had in her life that was nothing to do with Alison. The girls had all met through Alison in one way or another, and in the weeks before they had moved to Iceland, Alison had tainted Aria’s relationship with her parents every time she made some snide remark about how she would tell Ella everything if Aria didn’t toe the line. And it wasn’t just her parents, it was Mike, too.

Now, of course, it turned out that her relationship with Ezra had been all about Alison too, since he’d started dating her as part of researching his stupid true crime novel about Alison’s disappearance. Aria knew that Ezra had made that decision himself, but there was a part of her that couldn’t help but blame Ali anyway. It felt almost as though Ali had taken away the one last thing that was truly hers.

Aria started thinking about her own return home again as Alison was talking about how nervous she was about returning to Rosewood and how it wasn’t the same place she had left behind, that she didn’t know how to react when she saw her mother again after Jessica had buried her alive. And a part of Aria was sympathetic to Alison, she really was. But there was another part of her that wondered whether things might be easier in Rosewood if Ali stayed away. Although they’d all been brought together through Ali originally, their friendships with each other had been stronger without her around, and at least in Iceland (if maybe not in Rosewood) that had been the case for her family, too. Of course, Aria was pleased that Alison was still alive after all. But she wasn’t sure how she felt now about a Rosewood with Alison in it.


End file.
